As soon as that sailor had told me all about Waylao’s adventures, and acquainted me with the fact that she was stopping in Samoa, I made up my mind to get a berth if possible on the same boat. I was rewarded with success, for when the H—— sailed out of Suva Harbour I was on board.
I see by my diary notes that we had a very rough passage across, and did not arrive at Apia till we were a week overdue.
It was after sunset when we anchored in that crescent-shaped harbour off Apia. I vividly remember the scene, and hubbub of the clamouring natives as they swarmed about our schooner in their strange, outrigged canoes.
Samoa is a kind of Italy of the Southern Seas. The people of those palm-clad isles seem to be ever singing. They sing as they paddle, they sing as they toil, they sing as they beg and in their huts, or under the palms, they sing themselves to sleep.
The very speech of the Samoans is sweet and musical. Their fine eyes beam with lustrous light, as though, in making them, God touched their vision with a little spare starlight. I never saw such physiques, the Marquesans excepted. Clambering out of their outrigged canoes on to the shore, or stalking beneath the coco-palms, they looked like bronzed Grecian statues of shapely Herculean art, statues that could come down from their pedestals and roam beneath the forest palms at will.
It was late that night when I at last got ashore. In the distance glimmered a few dim lights in Apia’s old township, and as I walked under the palms I heard the guttural voices of the Germans who passed by going back to their ship in the bay.
I will not weary my reader over the trouble I had to find the home of the Matafas who dwelt near Apia. When the old Samoan chief, under whose protection the boatswain of the H—— had placed Waylao, lifted his hands and looked despairingly at me, I could have dropped from disappointment.
“Ah, the beautiful, strange girl from the big waters, she gone!” he said, when I eventually let out the reason for my coming to his humble little homestead. I must admit that at first I wondered if the old chief was deceiving me, but as he stood there, under the flamboyant tree, he looked earnest enough, and so my disappointment was complete.
It was some time before I could get out of the old native exactly all that had occurred, for, like all his race, he beat about the bush in all manner of ways ere he came to the main point. But so as not to beat about the bush myself, I will say at once that Waylao had stopped with them for three weeks; and one morning when they had gone to awaken her they found she had flown.
Old Matafa was a Samoan of the good old school. Although Christianised and extremely devout in his exclamations about the new creed, still, deep in his heart, he nursed the old memories of the heathen gods.